This is my first foray with Cheever in decades, the last being Bullet Park, of which I have no real memory. Falconer shares with the little Updike I've read that quality of describing bourgeois suburban marriages and their particular material and emotional concerns in a way that dulls any sympathy I might feel toward the characters. No one is this story is especially winning or admirable or singular.

Neither the prisoners nor their guards nor even Farragut himself inspire any real empathy — I want simple humanity for all of them but otherwise can imagine no kind of meaningful life for any of them outside Falconer's walls. Probably I'm poisoned by popular entertainment to want at least one character with whom I can relate, for whom I have a rooting interest — not strictly speaking an innocent man, because who among us? — and yet Cheever firmly denies us that character.

Cheever does, however, open Chapter 3 with a spellbinding, almost transcendent description of addiction with whose prose I wish the rest of Falconer shared more in common. There is the occasional paragraph or scrap of dialogue or turn of phrase that excites the reader for a moment, but it never again approaches the heights of Chapter 3. It merely trudges along, as one presumes prison itself does. Maybe that's the point.